By Prashanth Parameswaran
“The future of the United States and the future of ASEAN are absolutely interconnected,” Kerry said.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is essential to upholding Asia’s rules-based system, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a speech delivered in Malaysia on Wednesday.
Kerry, who is on a trip to Southeast Asia covering Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, stressed that ASEAN was critical to addressing shared challenges during his stop in Kuala Lumpur to attend a series of multilateral meetings – which Malaysia is hosting as this year’s ASEAN chair.
“ASEAN is essential to upholding the rules-based system in Asia and to ensuring that all countries, big and small, have a say in how we address shared challenges, including economic development, climate change, human trafficking and marine conservation,” Kerry said.
Kerry also reaffirmed ASEAN’s role as being “at the very center” of the Asia-Pacific’s multilateral architecture, a reference to the organization’s prized centrality in the alphabet soup of groupings in the region.
Read the full story at The Diplomat